I've been reading most of the thread on package creation and trust and I still think we should be considering a different approach of allowing direct involvement and participation of third parties on the construction of OpenSUSE.
I believe having a lot of packages (without allowing redundant packages) would be good, even if some of them are not as properly maintained as they could be. I would rather have 3 ISOs of very properly maintained software + 4 ISOs of averagely maintained packages + 4 ISOs of sparringly maintained software than just 3 ISOs of very properly maintained software. I feel that allowing relatively unused packages into the distribution would be benefical, at least better than not including them at all. I don't see any reasons why the quality of the "3 ISOs of very properly maintained software" would diminish by allowing the rest of the packages into the distribution. In this case, if a package is poorly maintained, anyone should be allowed to contribute and help improve its quality. Oh, and we could use tools similar to Debian's popularity contest to decide how to place our RPMs in our ISOs (probably marking the less important ISOs as "additional" or "optional"). Certainly, I'm not advocating letting anyone put up random crap and making it part of the distribution! I think there are many alternatives less extreme than the "Novell remains in control" approach. Althoug I use SLES, SUSE Pro and NLD almost every day, I've been a long time Debian user: my perception is that most of their packages are of *very* *good* quality (it should be said that I have very little familiarity with Fedora). In their case, allowing anyone to create packages that are official part of the distribution has most certainly not decreased their overall quality. In my case I would package the Chicken Scheme compiler (along with many extensions) and the Ion window manager. Sure, they are relatively unpopular, but having them part of the distribution would surely make the life of those who depend on them easier. With the current approach, I can't see any reasons why third-party developers would prefer to participate in (i.e. create packages for, promote, etc.) OpenSuSE rather than a distribution such as Debian, where they can become directly involved (as long as the specified procedures are followed). The reason I ask this is because, being a Novell employee, I am genuinously concerned with the future of OpenSUSE and I think its chances of success would be greater with a different approach. I know most of the Novell guys at SuSE are currently occupied with getting the 10.0 release out, but I find this issue far more important. It's a shame I couldn't jump into the discussion earlier. Thanks. Alejo. http://azul.freaks-unidos.net/ ---=( Comunidad de Usuarios de Software Libre en Colombia )=--- ---=( http://bachue.com/colibri )=--=( [EMAIL PROTECTED] )=---
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